April 29, 2007

April 28, 2007

Uncle Ezra at PennSound
&
Uncle John at ubu
&
Bob Grenier's Oakland
&
Meg Hamill's Death Notices
&
Dorianne Laux interview
&
Shiela E. Murphy interviews Javant Biarujia
&
1987 interview with Marcelin Pleynet
&
The folks at Ugly Duckling have done everyone a favor: 0 to 9
&
"I thank you for your attention, and I'm outta here."

April 27, 2007

Bob Rafelson, Head (1968). 85 minutes.

The Monkees made this flick after their series got canned in an attempt to refashion/resurrect their image (the word plastic gets thrown around repeatedly). Acidy-trippy hi-jinks follow (co-writ by Jack Nicholson).

Notes:

anti-war
anti-product placement
anti-marketing created image
anti-Hollywood fakisms
anti-commercialism (blew that vending machine up good, twice)
awareness of career suicide as they all jumped from a bridge in the end

That is, biting the hand that fed them all the way.

Pop art with an agenda.

April 27, 2007

The bros. Chapman do Dilbert but better.

April 27, 2007

As a shameless appropriator in my creative work, I sometimes acutely feel the double standard I have to uphold while teaching composition classes.

creative plagiarism=okay
academic plagiarism=bad, very bad

April 26, 2007

from Erika Staiti:

The editors of 580 Split are pleased to announce 

the release of Issue 9!

Saturday May 5th 2007
9pm-close

Eli’s Mile High Club
3629 MLK Jr. Way Oakland, CA
http://www.oaklandmilehigh.com/

Featuring music by Modular Set

Readings at 10pm by

Will Alexander
Trevor Calvert
Jenny Drai
Javier Huerta


Hope to see you there!

April 25, 2007

Only two weeks until the end of the semester. I have been lining up the summer writing projects (both poetic & scholarly), and my studio desk is awash in xeroxes and interlibrary loan books. I even pulled out my Chinese grammar book today and started to do characters--ugh, let's just the say the hiatus from practicing hasn't made my hanzi any more beautiful. I may even pull out my Wheelock and Lambdin (Latin & Hebrew respectively) over the weekend and start getting refreshed on conjugations and declensions. Maybe this will be the summer that I try to rescue the languages from the chasms of my memory that I worked so hard at in graduate school then shelved once I started working. Maybe.

April 21, 2007

If you're in San Francisco today, go down to Pier 40.


from the press release:

What could the World’s Fair of today look like if artists were involved in envisioning the future? The graduating class of the MA Curatorial Practice Program at the California College of the Arts have considered this scenario as they prepare to launch The San Francisco World’s Fair of 2007.

The San Francisco World’s Fair of 2007 is a weekend event showcasing new commissions, films and artworks that connect local and international conversations about the nature of progress.

With the advent of the Third Street Light Rail, the Fair amplifies heated debates around redevelopment and mobility specific to Dogpatch and Bayview Hunter’s Point, two neighborhoods adjacent to CCA that are, in many ways, the city’s “final frontier.“ Through site-specific projects and interventions, the Fair attempts to question whose voices, how, and what should be represented in a celebration of change and movement.

The San Francisco World’s Fair of 2007 will take place April 21-22, 2007 in multiple locations along the Third Street Corridor including Warm Water Cove Park, Cyclone Arts Center, Agua Vista Park, Sundance Coffee, and The Bayview Opera House. The Fair invites the public to encounter a number of artist projects while journeying via light rail, bicycle, on foot or aboard a bio-diesel bus, in an exploration of the beautiful and contested neighborhoods of Dogpatch and Bayview Hunter’s Point.

A limited edition catalogue with essays and projects will be available at the event.

A map locating the various public projects and a timetable of events will be made available at The San Francisco World’s Fair hub, stationed at Pier 40.

April 20, 2007

It would seem that in a city the size of Oakland, it wouldn't be too terribly hard to find 10 AM/FM transitor radios with speakers.

April 20, 2007

Thanks to Goodwill for turning me on to the poetry of Rosario Murillo. They had Angel in the Deluge (City Lights, 1992) for $1.29. Mother of 8, Sandinista, First Lady of Nicaragua and poet.

from "Incantation for New Year's Day"

I will write my name to reacquaint myself
and be borne once more
I will knit snares to protect my invisible territory
I'll spread quail wings
for love's singular flight.
I'll be a planet inhabited by all the hearts of the world
and like all hearts of the world I'll feel
joy
and death.
Each morning I'll try on a child's eyes
and a child's smile
and a child's tears
so as to learn to live from the beginning.

April 20, 2007

April 19, 2007

A nice treat today was Murat Nemet-Nejat's translation of 15 poems by Turkish poet Orhan Veli in Talisman #34.

Aprl 18, 2007

Somewhat ironically, this was the first night that I slept through the night without extended breaks of wakefulness in what seems like forever but is most probably weeks.

April 18, 2007

So I had a dream that a cockroach crawled up into my left nostril and no matter what I did, I could't dislodge it. It wasn't traumatic, but very disconcerting. When I woke up mid-dream with a bloody nose from selfsame nostril, I immediately thought, "So it's going to be like this, is it?"

Luckily, it wasn't like that at all today. It was the other way.

April 16, 2007

Artist Xu Zhen gave Sha an email interview for her thesis.

The Ides of April, 2007

So which matters more, the libretto or the music behind? And why are they cutting separate checks?

April 14, 2007

The Thin Man series:

Hats aside, Mryna Loy (Nora) plays a proto-feminist figure who can go drink-for-drink (a marathon feat for the feminine sidekick of a Dashiell Hammett character) and keep up with the rough boys.

April 13, 2007

Oddly enough, I just learned that the name of the sleeping pills they gave me in China is a phonetic translation of a general term: anodyne.

The Chinese term was 安定 (an ding).

I've seen this word twice in print today and wonder how it wasn't part of my active vocabulary.

April 13, 2007

For the first time this semester I am actually caught up in both classes I'm teaching. Totally caught up. I actually have a free weekend. I even had time today to start thumbing through Meg Hamill's Death Notices (Factory School, 2007) and began to peruse the 1933 League of Nations Verdict on China and Japan in Manchuria (where the last Chinese emperor Aisin-Gioro Pu Yi was set up by Japan as a puppet leader) for a project I am trying to map out for the summer. It's only a temporary calm as the semester ends in three weeks and two more rounds of drafts and final revisions, etc . . . blah. It was just good to be able to focus on these works today. I'm excited about both.

April 10, 2007

Um, I liked Rocky Balbao.

Read as a swansong from a (boxer, film-maker) veteran that recognizes his prime days have past, there may yet be something "in the basemant" worth paying attention to.

Rocky (in the film) just may be the rearguard doing mop up.

April 9, 2007

Here comes everybody; I mean, I'm off to opening day at the Coliseum.

April 9, 2007

Anyone with a good non-narcotic, non-alcoholic insomnia remedy, please let me in on it. The usual soothing teas, vitamins, stretching/exercise, and even reading Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities aren't cutting it any more. Seriously folks, I'll try just about anything at this point.

April 7, 2007

Tristan Tzara. "Note on Poetry." Seven DaDa Manifestos and Lampisteries. Trans and ed. Barbara Wright. Edison, NJ: Riverrun, 1992. 75-8.

"A poem is no longer a formal act: subject, rhythm, rhyme, sonority. When projected on to everyday life, these can become means, whose use is neither regulated nor recorded, to which I attach the same weight as I do the crocodile, to burning metals, or to grass. Eye, water, equilibrium, sun, kilometre, and everything that I can imagine as belonging together and which represents a potential human asset, is sensitivity. The elements love to be closely associated, truly hugging each other, like the cerebral hemispheres and the cabins of transatlantic liners.

Rhythm is the gait of the intonations we hear, but there is a rhythm that we neither see nor hear: the radius of an internal grouping that leads towards a constellation of order. Up to now, rhythm has been the beating of a dried-up heart, a little tinkle in putrid, padded wood. I don't want to put fences round what people call principles, when what is at stake is freedom. But the poet will have to be demanding towards his own work in order to discover its real necessity: order, essential and pure, will flower from this asceticism -- (Goodness without a sentimental echo, its material side.)

To be demanding and cruel, pure and honest towards the work one is preparing and which one will be situating amongst men, new organisms, creations that live in the very bones of light and in the imaginitive forms that actions will take -- (REALITY.)

The rest, called literature, is a dossier of human imbecility for the guidance of future professors" (76-7, writ 1919).

April 5, 2007

Alaska Quarterly Review 23.3&4 (2006).
I like what editor Ronald Spatz has done in this issue. Extending the idea of a chapbook within a journal, this issue presents an entire book within the journal: Albert Goldbarth's Of Like Mind: New and Selected Poems graces pp. 179-248. I find this an interesting editorial model.

April 5, 2007

T h e G l o b a l E n v i r o n m e n t a l C r i s i s
by M.Mara-Ann
~ a multi-media performance ~

FRI :: April 6th @ 8pm
Mills College Concert Hall,
5000 MacArthur Blvd., Oakland
FREE

featuring:
Anantha Krishnan, percussion
Andy Strain, trombone
Caroline Penwarden, accordian
Jordan Glenn, drums
Travis Ortiz, electronics
Alexa Hall, voice
Erica Montoya, voice
M.Mara-Ann, voice
Sarah Elena Palmer, voice
Vanessa Beggs, voice
Janet Collard, movement
Rebecca Wilson, movement

------------------------------
plus, two short films:
Jacob Eichert Landscape Amongst Clouds
Jennifer Nellis i, spoon

and, Poetry PLASTIQUE (in the foyer)
installations by:
c.marie smith
denni s oMera
Dillon Westbrook
Lara E. Durback
Laurel DeCou
Luke Selden
Jeremy James Thompson, currator
Mashinka Firunts
POLIS (j.D. Mitchell-Lumsden/Chad Lietz)
Travis Ortiz

April 4, 2007

Crime report that covers all reported crimes within a mile radius of my address in East Oakland.

Aggravated Assualt: 40
Alcohol: 18
Arson: 7
Burglary: 23
Disturbing the Peace: 3
Gambling: 1
Murder: 2
Narcotics: 53
Prostitution: 12
Robbery: 29
Simple Assualt: 46
Theft: 47
Vandalism: 16
Vehicle Theft: 110

Grand Total: 407

This is a huge improvement from when I last checked these stats back in January when the grand total was 900 even, a reduction of about 55% in reported crimes.

April 4, 2007

Sha just phoned to tell me she past the oral part of her defense and now just needs to tweak the thesis to graduate. Phew & congrats to Sha!

April 4, 2007

I hate the type of insomnia I suffer. By the time I realize that I'm not going to get any sleep, it's much too late to do anything about it. I'm left with the dilemma of what kind of haze I want for the next day: the kind where the ambien is still kicking in or the kind where I am slow because I have had an hour or less of sleep. Today, I chose the latter, which allowed me to use the adjective drag-ass repeatedly (as in, I'm all drag-ass today).

April 4, 2007

Poetry Best Sellers at SPD for March 2007:

1. Telling the Future Off Stephanie Young (Tougher Disguises Press)
2. Case Sensitive Kate Greenstreet (Ahsahta Press)
3. The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You Frank Stanford (Lost Roads)
4. Ludlow David Mason (Red Hen Press)
5. Broken World Joseph Lease (Coffee House Press)
6. Untangled Karen Taylor, Ed. (WriteGirl)
7. Threads Jill Magi (Futurepoem Books)
8. Daily Sonnets Laynie Browne (Counterpath Press)
9. Sadder Than Water: Selected Poems Samih al-Qasim (IBIS Editions)
10. Bone Pagoda Susan Tichy (Ahsahta Press)
11. Apostrophe Elizabeth Robinson (Apogee Press)
12. Barefoot on a Drawing of the Sun J.J. Blickstein (Fish Drum, Inc)
13. Young Girl Eating a Bird Richard Beban (Ren Hen Press)
14. Instinct Joanna Straughn (Bright Hill Press)
15. PP/FF: An Anthology Peter Conners, Ed. (Starcherone Books)
16. The Stripping Point Brian Henry (Counterpath Press)
17. Tom Thomson in Purgatory Troy Jollimore (Margie/IntuiT House Poetry Series)
18. Souvenir De Constantinople Donna Stonecipher (Instance Press)
19. The Book of the Rotten Daughter Alice Friman (BkMk Press)
20. Theory of Orange Rachel M. Simon (Pavement Saw Press)

April 1st, 2007

Baseball, much more than the theater, has a democratic audience.

At the game, I feel free and talk up the guy in the seat next to me wihtout thinking twice and the row before me; we swap stats, differ on Piazza as an A, boo equally hard at Bonds' homerun in the first. Chat about pre-season stats and possible trades.

Racial and econimic factors dictate that we most likely would never ever talk to each other on the BART, as that would undermine another set of recognized rules that everyone seems to inherently understand and abide by. The idea that we could be more than ballbark friends (assuming we each repeatedly showed up at the same games in the same seats) is unlikely.

In this way, baseball is an amazing democratic institution.

Oakland 8
San Francisco 5

April 1, 2007

Philip Kan Gotanda, After the War at ACT Theater

After the War explores what it means to be an American who is forced to operate outside the center of American society. The historical backdrop of post internement camp Japantown brings together a mix of folks on the margins: a No-No Boy jazz musician, a wealthy Japanese entrpreneur/crook, an unemployed Black man from the Deep South, a Russian prostitute, a poor Oklahoma woman and her slow younger brother. . . the effect of which shows that even in the end, the power that is practicised within these communities can be trumped at any time by the central powers that be.

While steeped in a specific historical situation of a very specific San Francisco neighborhood, the questions Gotanda poses are relevant and on point to contemporary American society, as questions of power, patriotism, race, and inner city planning are all still very current in today's conversations.